folio : short takes on the prose poem
The question I like to pose is is the prose poem still revolutionary. Once upon a time, Victor Hugo got in trouble for moving a comma to an experimental spot in his otherwise strict alexandrine poem. This (trouble) continues to be the story of poetry. When Victor Hugo died, the tall mirrored hallways of Real Poetry and Perfect Rhyme were vandalized by the hard-flung fruit of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud who, I would argue, embody a “prose poetry spirit.” What is the “prose poetry spirit” you might ask. It is the spirit of Patti Smith and Jean Genet, of Bob Kaufman and Layli Long Soldier, of Cathy Park Hong and Claudia Rankine, of Lu Xun and Fenton Johnson. It’s a type of punk. But it is also more than this. It’s a type of resistance to the status quo that goes beyond breaking out of traditional genre. It’s experimental living. Megaphone poetry. And, most importantly, it is not found in the shape of the work. Sometimes, a prose poem masquerades as a poem with line breaks. Sometimes a prose poem is a song or a gesture. Sometimes a prose poem is a decision or a march. The more I learn about prose poetry, the more emphatically I can state it has nothing to do with margins, postcards or quirkiness. Like Rimbaud states of a morning of drunkenness (something akin to the prose poem spirit), “Cela commença par quelques dégoûts et cela finit,--ne pouvant nous saisir sur-le-champ de cette éternité,--cela finit par une débandade de parfums." Or, in Ashbery’s translation, “It began with disgust and ended in a panicked rout of perfumes.”
dawn is not the poem but the space between the dawn and the microscope is
dawn-hatched light holds us in the spell of exactly a threshold
situation when we’re compelled to write “the truth” we can hear it arrive like
a lens over a petal or stamen over gravity others agree the ______ sits at the
bucolic equivalent of an imaginary
table with a width and height always delineated in cursive and therefore dead
as the animal you ate for breakfast
the
poet says the tongue’s
the
mind’s mint lozenge
is suspicious of synonyms of vibrations impinging on a nerve of
reflections in water when we try to think of what has happened we think of the
difference between passed, past and passing and we hate
them equally beside us are flowers we know them and do not yet know a bull
thistle usurping a luggage tag as a souvenir
it’s true what has happened this pink thorn this crowned bulb at least
one connection to our lit-up exit
